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The Wandering Minstrel is one of the many legendary creatures inMagic: The Gathering’scrossover with Final Fantasy as a part of its Universes Beyond product line. The Wandering Minstrel comes from Final Fantasy 14, an NPC that gives you difficult content in the game (and is modeled after the director of Final Fantasy 14, Naoki Yoshida).
Towns are a land type introduced in the Final Fantasy set, and The Wandering Minstrel is the go-to commander if you want to build a deck around Towns. Since The Wandering Minstrel has all five colors in its color identity, it allows you to play every Town in the game.
Azusa, Lost but Seeking
Field of the Dead
Windursyt, Federation Center
Zanarkand, Ancient Metropolis
The decklistcontains 28 creatures, nine sorceries, 14 instants, nine artifacts, five enchantments,and34 lands. Most of the permanents care about lands entering the battlefield, with the instant line-up being interaction and removal.
Key Cards
The Wandering Minstrel
The commander, The Wandering Minstrel, gives a big boost to all your Town cardsby making them (and any other land) enter untapped. This gets around the downside of them being taplands, allowing to use them instantly. Youwant to load up your battlefield with Towns as quickly as possible.
The Wandering Minstrel’s ability is a replacement effect, meaning it will always make lands enter untapped, even if they come to the battlefield tapped as a part of its clause, such as with Reach the Horizon.
The main threshold of Towns you want to hit is five or more,as that’s when The Wandering Minstrel starts to produce tokens. The more Towns you have, themore powerful your creatures becomewith The Wandering Minstrel’s pump effect.
Both Field of the Dead and The Necrobloom share near-identical effects.Both create 2/2 Zombies when a land enters, so long as they have different names(with Necrobloom only making a 0/1 Plant otherwise).Creating these tokenshelps to amass a battlefield quickly, especially if both are on the battlefield at the same time.
If any lands wind up in the battlefield,The Necrobloom can dredge them back to your hand by milling two cards. This ideally won’t come up often, but can help in a pinch. The Necrobloom alsoacts as a great wall, since seven toughness is a high statline for your opponents to deal with.
Omo, Queen Of Vesuva
Omo, Queen of Vesuva’s power comes from the ability togive your lands every land type. Towns are a land type, so one with an everything counter on it will count as a Town. For the purposes of The Wandering Minstrel,this gives you more Towns for its stat-boosting effect.
You can also put everything counters on your creatures. Certain cards,such as Avenger of Zendikar, interact with specific creature types, allowing you to take advantage of their effects even though the creature isn’t that type normally.
Felidar Retreat
You will be playing a ton of lands, andFelidar Retreat is perfect for growing your battlefield in both creatures and power. You can only choose one option per land, but you can choose whichever effect based on your current battlefield presence.
If multiple lands enter the battlefield at the same time, both lands will trigger landfall. So if two lands enter at once, you’ll get two triggers of Felidar Retreat.
Ifyou have a low amount of creatures, make a 2/2 Cat Beast. Otherwise,if you have a wide battlefield already, it’s better to give them a +1/+1 counter. The second effect also gives your creatures vigilance, allowing them to attack while still being able to be used as blockers the next turn.
How To Play The Deck
General Game Plan
The Wandering Minstrel is a Commander deck thatwants you to get as many Towns on the battlefield as possible and as frequently as possible. Since Towns come in every color, you’ll quickly be able toget all five colors activeso you can start casting any spell you need. Both Chromatic Lantern and the World Tree help to produce all colors of mana as well.
The deck has 23 natural Towns, but Omo, Queen of Vesuva helps to turn your non-Town lands into Towns to make it easier to achieve the threshold needed to make the most of The Wandering Minstrel.
Themajority of the lands in the deck are Towns, which makes it a bit awkward to play traditional green ramp. As such, taking advantage of cards that search for any lands is necessary, such as The World Map, Expedition Map, Open the Way, and most notably, Reach the Horizon, which tutors for Towns specifically.
Most of the permanentshave a landfall ability. The deck’s landfall abilities generallyeither create a creature token, draw you a card, or put +1/+1 counters on your creatures. You always want lands in your hand to make sure you trigger these landfall abilities, and once you have a lot, you can start pumping creatures' stats with The Wandering Minstrel.
Win Conditions And Flaws
Theprimary win condition of the deck is winning through combat. Youwant to create a ton of creature tokens before pumping them with The Wandering Minstrel. Often, just one activation of The Wandering Minstrel can lead to taking someone out of the game, if not everyone, if you have a big enough battlefield.
A Wandering Minstrel Commander deck’sbiggest downside is playing five colors. Anatural flaw of a WUBRGis that you may have situations where you need a specific color, but you don’t have the right lands for your spells. WhileThe World Tree and Chromatic Lantern can help, you also need to draw those cards to use them, something easier said than done. As such, you may wind up being unable to do anything until you can get the right colors.
